


The Zones: Static's Night Ramblings

by StaticPhantom



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Danger Days Era, Headcanon, Post-Danger Days, Rambling, Zone Five Quarantine Fair Prompts (Fabulous Killjoys)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25539649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaticPhantom/pseuds/StaticPhantom
Summary: Some thoughts/character work on the Zones, their inhabitants and those who watch over them.Some prompts from KilljoyNest's Zone 5 Quarantine Fair, most are unprompted.I hope you enjoy these musings on the desert, 'Joys, escape and the City.
Kudos: 1





	1. Escape

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

I never knew before why the soles of our shoes were so unforgiving. Slabs of concrete attached to the bottoms of creaky leather uppers with no give. Many of us in the Institute retired to our rooms at night with red welts rising on our heels- not that our drug riddled minds registered the pain.

I understood now, as the hard rubber slapped against dirty cement, weaving between Porno Droids with rusted joints and eyes that longed to follow me. Their fixed smiles and clothes torn by greedy hands rushed past my eyes. 

If they couldn’t make it out then who was I to believe I could perform such a feat? I had barely ever run in my life, the Institute’s harsh guidelines entirely to blame. The few ‘droids had become many as the streets became grimier, accompanied by their oily customers. 

Why push forwards? Why run from those with whom I would entrust my entire life before now? Would it not simply be easier to stop and allow myself to fall back to a comfortable bed and a predictable life? 

The darting eyes of a shadowed vendor answered each question with a single glance. The manhole was just big enough for someone slightly larger than myself-an easy escape to the vast unknown.


	2. Neutrals

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

The Zones are no place for someone who couldn’t make up their mind, yet here we are. A grey town filled with the same people as any other with the common sense not to make a name for themselves. People desperately clinging to a life only half of them can even remember. 

To believe that any one of us can escape the sweltering heat and chafing sands of the desert without being thrust into a stark, unforgiving concrete rat maze is as rational as chasing the heat mirages which flash into a shimmering existence on the edge of the horizon after hours under the looming sun.

The Neutrals aren’t all bad. Their misguided dreams masked a community merely trying to survive, as we all are out here. 

Besides, you ever seen a ‘Joy raise a family of two kids in a broken apartment complex? We retrobates wouldn’t last a day in domestic life.


	3. Names

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

There’s some old proverb or quote or something about greatness. It kinda just says that you either make your own greatness or have it shoved at you, or something like that.

The same goes for names. Some get to choose their own, an alias under which to bury their old identity until it rots away to nourish the desert’s few plants. Others don’t have as much say- an identity blossoms from a nickname whispered so as not to wake a new escapee on their first night.

However a ‘Joy finds their name, it keeps them safe from the greedy eyes in the City whose records don’t contain a ‘Toxic Night’ or ‘Planetary Shock.’ They can learn codenames but unless they decipher the reworked identities and looks of the smirking rebels attached, they have no power over us.

Legend tells of a file as big as four manuals stacked on top of each other hiding in Dr. D’s station. It’s said to contain the name of every Killjoy and ‘joy associated Neutral in the Zones. They say that’s how he does the Traffic.

A mammoth list of names blemished with lines of red and black ink for each soul delivered to the Phoenix Witch.


	4. Radio

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

The sun had barely set over the shimmering desert sands. The Fog Line grew until each filthy tire and rusty engine held together with cable ties and tape was blanketed in a musty shadow. Night Racers’ engines screamed at each other on distant roadways, each whine searching for a solid object on which to create its echo to no avail.

Those who rejected a nocturnal lifestyle remained indoors under patched roofs, their worn bodies draped with the blankets one would call luxurious, had they come across them twelve years ago. Cries reverberated through every lonely mind once the day and its accompanying noise had sunk into the desolate horizon. Those old enough to remember the Analog Wars found their ears plagued with toppling walls and the twisted limbs of silent victims trapped beneath them. Almost everyone in the Zones had lost a lifeline at some point or another. Some lay awake cursing Better Living, some used the Phoenix Witc as their victim. Others longed for themselves to be next- to cast their soul up to Destroya and join their family.

No matter which memories haunted the ‘Joys, a crackling voice, impervious to time and age, quieted the horrors for an hour or two. DJs can’t save the souls of those longing for release but they can satiate them long enough to allow the owner a few hours of sleep.

Anyone who DJs knows half the ‘Joys can’t sleep without the radio blasting music into the empty desert nights.

The echoes of their memories are too loud without it.


	5. Droids

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

I had never been this far away from the pristine halls of he Institute for this long. The grimy streets of The City’s outskirts had been painfully neglected by the Inner City’s funding and clean-up regimes. It seemed that the patrols out in the grubby alleyways existed purely to remove those disobeying the City’s laws from the unkempt streets. 

Sounds I had never heard before flooded my ears- most notably were perhaps the voices that sounded perfectly normal at first, but once you strained your ears a little more they began to sound... off.

Although they didn’t sound quite like one, the Android Girls were the most humane people I had ever met. My second night away from the plastic safety of Better Living’s tomb would have been spent on mouldy concrete if three Droids hadn’t shown me to the foyer of an old hotel. It had been repurposed into a sanctuary for helpless runaways and Girls too tired to face another night of greedy hands and sweaty legs. 

While each Girl looked almost the same with different hair and painted lingerie, every one had their own motives, their own ideas which BL/Ind had never accounted for. They were fearful in the world, but fearless when it came to defending those who could feel pain.


	6. Zones

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

No one was ever really sure where one zone ended and the other began. The vast expanses of endless desert between each shoddily constructed homestead seemed to alter its distance depending on the time of day. You could be driving down the stretch between 5 and 6 at midday and make it across by 1:30 with the expected level of gas still in the car, then make the same journey that evening and wind up with an empty tank within the same timeframe. 

The Zones were a mystery even to those who had been running them since the day they could reach the pedals. Every guess of the distance in miles between each zone seemed accurate until the car’s dash said you’d travelled twenty miles in the span of half an hour. Some put it down to faulty speedometers and mile counters. Others let the Phoenix Witch act as the perpetrator- trying to keep the ‘Joys on their toes and the Dracs lost in confusion. Some even claimed the desert itself was responsible, though the ‘totally normal’ Power Pup sold by Zone 2′s alleyway vendors may have had something to do with that.

It was anyone’s guess what lay beneath the desert sands, but those who knew the desert were always prepared for their gas tank to be a little emptier than expected when they left the Phoenix Witch’s domain between Zones.


	7. Pills

.:Zone 5 Quarantine Fair:.

No-one knows what’s in the little half-black, half-white pills every Citizen is unknowingly forced to take. 

All we know is that those of us who lived in The City can’t remember a single detail until the ‘Crows come to call. The whites of their eyes hide years of Better Living’s training regimes. 

That’s when the memories kick in.


	8. Stars

You can’t truly begin to despise the City’s pre-set sky until you’ve spent your first night on a patchwork roof in the Zones. 

The stars pepper a sky which should be black, as it is within the Walls, but is instead mottled with dark navy blues and indigo. The vastness of a desert night sky can’t be recreated with any level of monochromatic technology,

You can’t simulate the hard corrugated metal beneath your back and the chill that sets into your bones. The sensation of belonging and loneliness melted together by the Witch’s benign power can only be brought about by the multitude of constellations inviting you into their world. No one remembers their real names, but we make do like children with a faded book of connect-the-dots.

The City can’t replicate the stars’ knowing winks as they vanish from the sky, nor the souls that the Phoenix Witch carries up to the realm of Destroya to watch over their family.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basic Idea: A gang that somehow shows up only once every four weeks (exactly) at the Market to spend as few carbons as possible on as many useless, random items as they can.

Counting the cycles between sweltering heat and unbearable cold was never important in the Zones. No-one even bothered to try for more than three days until one gang's arrival at the Market became eerily regimented.

Whispers began between the Vendors: four 'Joys that bought all the useless shit they'd put at the edges of their stands for nominal prices. Empty Power Pup tins, small glass stones, a piece of cork with a rusted pushpin stuck to it; objects put on sale as a futile joke for half a carbon each. They bought them all.

The crash queens can pretend not to care, but they still inexplicably find the fastest way to the Market when the mutters reach the Stations. Rumour has it that DJ Hot Chimp was the first to start counting. The vendors mentioned the gang in passing- their peculiar purchases, how they cropped up after long disappearances. She was the one to count the 28 days between each appearance.

It had become a sport almost as exhilarating as the Motorbabies’ races around the Desert. When it seemed like a Long Fuckin’ Time since the last appearance, ‘Joys and DJs alike would flock to the Market to see the Corvids- a name from Dr. D’s birdwatching book. It was useless out in the Zones but there were some good names hidden in the rotting pages. 

A heatstroke-induced night of bets and challenges led three separate gangs on the hunt for the Corvids’ whereabouts. They gave up runs and offers for the chance they could win a five-hundred carbon bet to find the bastards. Their attempts brought nothing but a car that drove into the Fog Line and vanished into its murk.


End file.
